1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to modulation of quality of service (QoS) in access networks. The invention is based on a priority application, EP 02360213.9, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
2. Background
Many sophisticated emerging applications, such as video streams, multimedia conferencing, or distributed virtual reality deploy in today's internetworking infrastructure. The main due requirement that all these applications share is the need for (guaranteed) quality of service (QoS) such as high bandwidth, delay, and jitter delay etc.
The ITU-T E.800 (08/94) recommendation introduces into the QoS concept on page 1 to 4 and defines there areas that affect the QoS. This recommendation describes factors that contribute collectively to the overall quality of service as perceived by the user of a telecommunication service. The user's degree of satisfaction of the quality of service can be divided into service performance areas like support, operability, servability, and security. It defines QoS as the collective effect of service performance which determines the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service.
Service providers that offer services with a guaranteed quality require management systems that can retrieve, calculate and present QoS data from the four performance areas. These management systems have to control the Service Level Agreements (SLA), between the consumers and the provider, and react on service quality violations according to business rules. Today there exist products to manage this, but no standards or de-facto standards exist to facilitate the integration of a QoS management system with other management systems such as mediation, billing and service activation as part of a total management solution.
The QoS requirements are typically specified in terms of bounds, e.g., the worst case end-to-end delay or the maximum bandwidth. Other parameters may be specified as well.
On the other hand the networks have limited resources with respect to quality of service. The resources are shared between consumers.
Today the resources are allocated mainly statically by consumers, e.g. according to a business model. There are colored services (gold, silver, bronze) available, where per connection at connection set-up a static type of QoS is chosen. From telephony an optimization is known, minimizing cost by choosing a subscription-type (provider), e.g., by a call-by-call prefix or user-preferences, at subscription time. Another example is the subscription-type (billing) to user-preferences in mobile communication. There is no cost reduction and no change of QoS at this moment, only billing is adapted while QoS remains.
This QoS management is of rather static type, configured administratively at subscription time. Changing the QoS and price of the subscription is an administrative task. The granularity of this approach is limited to the connection-setup, rather than the requirements of applications that use them.
This prior art has some major disadvantages. It does not take into account the cost for operator. Effectively no change of QoS, only billing is adapted while QoS remains the same. The approaches with respect to change are limited . Typically a user can change subscription mode 2 or 3 times. And the granularity is limited to a connection, instead of services or finer granularity. The QoS adaptation is triggered by user, based on match between preferences and behavior of the service. The user has to make the matching judgement himself.
Especially today's broadband access networks lack dynamic subscription types. There are static subscription types dealing with the connection as a whole. Typically, at subscription-time, the user chooses a type gold versus bronze and this type is not changed thereafter. If the user wants to use demanding services, he or she will have to change his or her entire connectivity subscription impacting all services and all family members.
FIG. 1 to FIG. 5 explain the current problems and the proposed solution. For a gold service, the end-user will pay a lot of money to have, e.g. a high bandwidth available at all times, satisfying most of his needs. Although the operator will have significant revenues, he will have to provision a lot of unused bandwidth.
For a bronze service, the end-user will have a cheap subscription that will limit the networking performance. An upgrade from bronze to gold will be expensive and will be a time-consuming administrative task.
Therefore it is necessary to provide a method for quality of service, e.g. bandwidth, allocation in an highly adaptive way.
Such a method for allocation of bandwidth in a predictive fashion is known from the international patent application WO 99/44335. There packets are identified with particular data streams and characteristics of the data streams are used to predict probable future bandwidth requirements. Such predictions are used to allocate high-bandwidth channels and to close or switch channels as in accordance with predicted needs. Preferably the system is self-learning and can modify a rules base for making allocation decisions e.g. based on actual use statistics.
European Patent EP 1 202 528 describes a development in the direction from a user's perspective instead of the technical view in terms of bandwidth, namely a browser-based monitoring system and method. A browser operable with a user's Internet-compliant device is provided for launching a transaction session, wherein a media-based parametric detector is associated with the browser in order to track a plurality of media-based parameters and metrics generated during the transaction session. The media-based parameters and metrics are effectuated at least in part due to the user's interaction with the browser with respect to the transaction session. A reporting structure is provided in association with the browser for reporting the media-based parameters and metrics to an Internet entity for effectuating an IP-based service.
European Patent Application EP 1 158 740 relates to a framework for achieving cross-adaptability by providing components for QoS management in the communication network(s) by means of a component coordinator unit and targets the uniformity problem.
European Patent Application EP 1 021 015 discloses a network-device control system for controlling a network device by acquiring user priority or application priority and, controlling in accordance with the priority.
The article, A CORBA-BASED QUALITY OF SERVICE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR DISTRIBUTED MULTIMEDIA SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS' IEEE NETWORK, IEEE INC. NEW YORK, US, vol. 13, no. 2, March 1999 (1 999-03), pages 70-79, XP000875023 ISSN:0890-8044 addressed issues of QoS management services in distributed multimedia services and applications. The article provides an end-to-end QoS management called the QoS management framework. A key component of this framework is the QoS Management Service Object, which orchestrates resources at endpoints, coordinating resource management across layer boundaries. Services such as translation, monitoring, admission, and negotiation are provided by the QoS Management Service Object allowing dynamic negotiation and renegoation of QoS by users.
A further method and apparatus for a variable bandwith experience for an end-user is described in the international patent application WO 01/50278.
It is a problem to provide network resources uniformly in terms of the above mentioned QoS efficiently in order to satisfy the real demand of customers, i.e. from a user's perspective instead of the technical view in terms of bandwidth, as good as possible. In order to solve this situation one has to schedule the network resources, i.e. the QoS, with respect to the requests and expectations of the users.